Nightfall's Nest: Basement
Xellos the restrained
First off, the relatively obvious.Mazoku's alternate forms often look like this:
Not like this.
(The picture without his human form is back on page one. For a mazoku, Xel shows a heck of a lot of restraint. His astral form is, although powerful and fascinating, is oddly unobtrusive. As for his human form, well, let's face it. Xel's cute and all, but he's also short and skinny and his mommy dresses him funny. The single most powerful mazoku after the five Dark Lords presents himself as a shrimpy geek who's lost his glasses somewhere.
Someone's holding out on us, guys. You can see it just looking at the waist-to-shoulder ratio above. He's not wearing pads or shoulder-guards: that's all him, and you can only see it from below in an updraft. Master of understatement is an understatement.
And then there's this (skip if you haven't seen NEXT yet).
That Yoda-looking woman is essentially the echo of the mind of God (I won't get technical). Suffice it to say that she and Xellos are absolutely not on the same side, in the grand scheme of things, and Xellos is able to put aside his species prejudices (and oh, brother, whether or not you think he's justified, has he ever got them) far enough to not only refrain from fighting with her, but to admit --aloud-- that he owes her a debt when she later transports Lina out of danger.
This guy could give Trowa Barton a run for his money on the tightropes.
You know, it's funny, but I really get the feeling that he means this. Throughout this exchange with Gaav's minions, he maintains this scolding edge of annoyance with their methods that sounds very schoolteacherish to me. It's one of a number of times that he gives hints of a certain high-mindedness which should be impossible for someone who feeds off negativity and is a slave to his appetites. A hypocrite could do it, but hypocricy is one of the few sins Xel won't touch with a ten foot dragon.
Email: Nightfall@suntemple.org